"Tbe aiprttator," jfebruarp 28tb, 1352.
THE NEW MINISTRY [Lord John Russell, the Prime Minister, had resigned, and a new Ministry, had been formed by Lord Derby, with Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer.] Here We arc at last with a Ministry at which we are all laughing; Protectionists among the number biting their lips, and_ trying to look grave, as if they believed the reality of the show—the government and guidance of twenty-seven millions of us in the British Isles, of many more of our kinsmen in every -quarter of the globe, in the hands of men of whom the ablest has hitherto shown himself only a brilliant declaimer and a dexterous weaver of statistical and financial cobwebs, and whose chief has earned for himself by a long Paliamentary activity, only the equivocal soubriquet of the ".Rupert of debate " ! And yet this Governnient is the sole possible alterna- tive. to such a pass have our foibles and our misfortunes brought us; and folly and misfortune are linked in political philosophy as cause and effect. This Government is Nature's sarcastic comment en our national conduct for some years past
—a practical reductio absurdum_of all we have been doing as a nation; an imperitive command to search into ourselves
and mend our ways, or worse will follow. .
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